Middle East policy confusion

The United States needs a foreign policy that puts a heavy emphasis on reaching a peace agreement and a permanent territorial settlement between Israel and the Palestinians. And that means, among other things, supporting an Israeli pullout from the occupied territories, because everyone knows that any peaceful settlement will involved such a withdrawal.

Otherwise, our Middle East policy will continue to promote instability and help breed war in the region. It also leaves a major grievance of the Muslim and Arab worlds to fester, as it has for the last 40 years since the 1967 war. The fact that cynical politicians encourage and support that sentiment for their own purposes doesn't make it any less of a widely-felt concern.

Currently, our Middle East policy is inevitably self-contradictory - not an unheard-of condition in foreign affairs - and often extremely so. The latter is the case with the US contribution to the latest round of the conventional arms race in the region. Consider the following news stories:

Bush to Urge Arms Sale to Saudi Arabia, Gulf States by Holly Rosenkrantz, Bloomberg.com 07/28/07:

Included in the package are advanced satellite-guided bombs, fighter-aircraft upgrades and new naval vessels. The administration also plans to announce a new 10-year military aid package to Israel and Egypt. The steps are part of an effort by the Bush administration to counter Iran's rising influence.

US: Saudi Arabia destabilising Iraq Aljazeera 07/29/07:

The US ambassador to the United Nations has accused Saudi Arabia and other US allies in the Middle East of undermining efforts to curb violence in Iraq.

Zalmay Khalilzad's comments, during a CNN interview on Sunday, follow reports that the US is set to announce the proposed sale of $20bn in weapons to Saudi Arabia and other Gulf states.

Khalilzad said he was also referring to Saudi Arabia when he wrote in an opinion piece in the New York Times last week that "several of Iraq's neighbours - not only Syria and Iran but also some friends of the US - are pursuing destabilising policies".

"Yes, well, there is no question that ... Saudi Arabia and a number of other countries are not doing all they can to help us in Iraq," Khalilzad, the former US ambassador to Iraq, said.

EE UU multiplica la ayuda militar a Israel para que afiance su poder en la región de Sal Emergui El País 30.07.07

En los últimos meses y lejos de la atención mundial, Israel y Estados Unidos han mantenido agrias diferencias que estuvieron a punto de derivar en una crisis bilateral. El motivo fue la intención del Pentágono de vender abundante y moderno material militar a otro gran aliado, Arabia Saudí. Israel, que había expresado su temor a que dicha ayuda pusiera en peligro su superioridad bélica en la zona, arrancó finalmente una suculenta promesa del presidente norteamericano, George W. Bush: algo más de 22.000 millones de euros de ayuda militar en los próximos 10 años.

[In recent months and outside the attention of the world, Israel and the United States have bitter differences that were at the point of causing a bilateral crisis. The reason was the Pentagon's intention to sell large quantities of modern military material to another important ally, Saudi Arabia. Israel, which had expressed its concern that such support would endanger its military superiority in the region, in then end won a lucrative pledge from the American President, George W. Bush: over 22 billion euros [roughly $32 billion] of military assistance in the the next 10 years.]

The Cheney-Bush administration has agreed to sell Saudi Arabia a new round of high-tech military equipment. To counter the growing influence of Iran.

The influence of Iran has grown for several reasons in recent years, by far the biggest being the US invasion of Iraq, which removed Iran's most immediate enemy, the Iraqi Baath Sunni regime, and replaced it with a very pro-Iranian Shi'a regime.

The Iran that meantime, the administration has been threatening with war off and on since the 2004 Presidential election.

At the same time, UN Ambassador Khalilzad is criticizing Sunni Saudi Arabia for not supporting the US-backed pro-Iranian regime in Baghdad. It's not just a matter of not supporting the Iraqi Shi'a regime. Saudi Arabia is helping to fund the Sunni resistance. And from the national origins of prisoners taken in Iraq, Saudis may be the most numerous among the foreign fighters that are considered, with some good reason, to be connected to Osama Bin Laden's Al Qa'ida.

Still, when the United States withdraws from Iraq - January 2008, July 2009, whenever it happens - and the Iraqi civil war escalates in violence as it likely will, the US will need to work with the neighboring countries (Saudi Arabia, Kuwait, Iran, Turkey, Syria, Jordan) to contain the violence and hopefully prevent the Iraqi civil war from becoming a full-blown regional war. So arming Saudi Arabia makes some sense from that perspective.

Except that the administration is threatening to go to war with Iran and already conducting a covert war against it. And doesn't even want to talk to Syria.

Israel, our closest ally in the Middle East (closer even than the pro-Iranian Shi'a regime that depends on American backing to survive), objected to the new weapons being given to its enemy Saudi Arabia. Understandably so.

So we're boosting military aid to Israel, increasing the incentive for other Middle East states to increase and upgrade their arsenals. And further angering Arabs and Muslims already angry about American aid to Israel. And increasing the already strong impression that the Cheney-Bush administration is essentially supporting Israel down the line, which reduces the United States' credibility to broker an Israeli-Palestinian peace settlement.

The US and Israel were at the point of a "bilateral crisis", and our diligent American press corps didn't pick up on it and report it? Not surprising, I guess, given the sadly dysfunctional state of the American press. Still, I don't recall seeing anything about that. Maybe it was out there; I don't scour the news for specific information about US-Israeli relations on a daily basis. But I would think that would be big news. It's always possible that the "bilateral crisis" bit was a negotiating ploy by either or both sides.

It's a mess. The three things that would most help the US to achieve an optimal situation for US interests in the Middle East are all things the Cheney-Bush administration have no intention of doing: achieving an Israel-Palestine permanent peace agreement; getting US troops out of Iraq; and, make serious and major efforts to convert to alternative fuels and reduce American dependence on oil.

Not going to war with Iran would also be a very good idea.

Tags: israel, saudi arabia